LexingtonThe Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki

WASHINGTON is scandalised by a report that President Donald Trump has insisted on seeing his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, one-on-one, with no witness present, during their summit in Helsinki on July 16th. Yet it seems more surprising that he could consider such a precaution necessary. To amend one of his more outlandish boasts, Mr Trump could walk down Fifth Avenue and publicly thank Mr Putin for his help in delivering him the White House and it might not cost him a vote. Of all the ways Mr Trump has altered the party of Ronald Reagan, none is more remarkable than its new complacency about Mr Putin and his ongoing effort to undermine American democracy.

Before Mr Trump entered politics in 2015, Republicans took a bleaker view of Russia than Democrats. Yet over the course of a presidential run in which Mr Trump expressed bizarre, fawning admiration for the Russian strongman, Republican opinion flipped. The proportion of Republicans who approved of Mr Putin doubled, to around 25%. And despite subsequent revelations that Russian spies were all the while flooding social media with pro-Trump propaganda and otherwise manipulating the election in his favour—decisively, in the view of James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence—Republican voters appear if anything more relaxed about the Russian threat now. Defying America’s own intelligence agencies, Mr Trump maintains there was no Russian meddling. Most Republicans say they agree with him—despite evidence suggesting senior members of Mr Trump’s campaign team knew of and welcomed the Russian help. Today, around half say they consider Russia friendly.

No wonder Washington policy types are alarmed by the summit plans. The president’s desire to be soft on his Russian counterpart (while claiming to be so tough) and his supporters’ willingness to accept whatever compromise he might have in mind—on Syria, Crimea, or whatever—are beyond doubt. The most cautionary precursor to Helsinki, a report issued this week by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee that confirms the agencies’ view on Russian election-meddling, has been mocked or ignored in conservative media. This is new terrain for America. It means that whatever reset Mr Trump may have in mind for Russia will be far less credible, far more divisive and tarnished by partisanship than the corresponding efforts of his two immediate predecessors in the White House.

It was this partisan dysfunction that made the Russian misinformation campaign so potent, even though it was haphazard and low-budget. (It appears to have cost less than Mr Trump’s travel arrangements for Helsinki will.) This is also why the cold-war framing of the summit, thanks to the choice of venue and grim talk by both administrations of a new low in relations, is off-beam. The summits Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held in the 1980s looked in retrospect like surrender talks between an ascendant America and a broken rival. In great-power terms, the Helsinki summit, by contrast, is scarcely about Russia at all. It is more a test of whether American foreign policy can navigate the fissures in America’s democracy that the summit’s participants, separately if not in tandem, have widened.

The structural forces behind the Republicans’ Russia delusion make that a forbidding examination. Like most of America’s political problems, they flow primarily from high levels of partisanship. Despite occasional blazing rows, foreign policy was until recently fairly bipartisan. But that consensus had been softening in both parties. Mr Trump has obliterated it. He has shown contempt for the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment and used foreign policy as a means for partisan point-scoring, including by dismantling whatever Barack Obama built. He also treats foreign policy as an instrument of his personal whims and interests. This is what the transactional edge he has inserted into American diplomacy boils down to. It is hard to imagine Mr Trump focused on any policy, least of all the long-term alliance-building his predecessors were committed to, that did not promise a win for him personally. This has made foreign policy unprecedentedly politicised: how Americans feel about it is almost entirely determined by how they feel about the president. How they feel about Russia illustrates this especially starkly—because the implications of thinking that Mr Trump is wrong and Mr Clapper right, as many Democrats do, is that the president may be illegitimate.

Other reasons for Trump supporters’ willing suspension of disbelief on Russia’s malign intent are unique to Republicans. The most important is the fervour of their support for Mr Trump’s blood-and-soil nativist policies. This is the main explanation for his hold on the right and the reason he can flip opinion on arcane foreign or economic policies so easily. American politics will remain fiercely antagonistic, polarising the country on foreign and domestic policy, so long as it is defined in such visceral terms.

From Washington with love

The Russian campaign was based on a simple appreciation of that fact. Many of its propaganda tools merely aped the sorts of chauvinist and ethno-nationalist sentiment that Mr Trump and other right-wing politicians have long used to charge up their base. The hashtag #Hillary4prison was a Russian favourite. A Russian Twitter account published an illustration of Jesus arm-wrestling Satan, with the headline: “Satan: If I win, Clinton wins!” Another reason Republicans might choose to deny the existence of such propaganda is because to do otherwise would be to admit that they have been had, and not only by Moscow.

Once a display of strength, relations with Russia have become a mirror to America’s big weakness, the political threat from within. That is why Mr Putin has been able to sow such chaos so cheaply; why he is getting away with it so easily; and why his meddling will surely continue. It is not clear what might break the cycle. But you can bet it will not happen in Helsinki.

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